Squeak Beginners Tutorial

Michael Haupt mhaupt at gmail.com
Mon Sep 25 08:41:12 UTC 2006


Hi,

first of all, thank you, Matthew, for tackling this. I'd actively
contribute to documenting Squeak if I had the time. For now, I can
volunteer to read and try documentation, tutorials, and such, if you
like.

On 9/25/06, Matthew Fulmer <tapplek at gmail.com> wrote:
> I admit that I am partial to pretty animations, and am not
> really interested in routine tasks like parsing log files.
> Also, I want to show the reader that Squeak not only makes
> "easy" things easy (log file inspection), but also makes "cool"
> things easy (animated widgets). I believe that is (or should be)
> a major selling point for Squeak.

Here's another personal opinion. Frankly, that tutorial wouldn't make
me too happy. What about the (in my opinion, most important) things in
between "easy" and "cool" - i.e., plain pragmatic every-day GUIs? I
really think those should be covered in any case, "cool" animated
widgets notwithstanding.

Let me explain. Over the last few days, I've been trying for some time
to assemble a GUI as simple as this: a SystemWindow with a
PluggableListMorph in it.

I must admit two things: I'm not an experienced GUI programmer, and
quite possibly I didn't try too hard, though it took me some time. In
the end, I gave up because I couldn't figure out how to make the
PluggableListMorph appear below the window's title bar.

I don't believe that assembling a GUI as simple as this should be too
complicated. Maybe it's very easy. I just couldn't do it, and that's
frustrating. (BTW browsing and exploring some of the other
SystemWindow offsprings didn't help much.)

So, really, please, please consider having a go at "normal" GUI stuff
as well. If I can build a fancy animated GUI, that's nice and
impressive, but if I want to develop something that just needs to
display some lists in some panes (like, say, a browser), that's at
least as interesting and relevant.

For example, John Maloney's Morphic tutorial is great, but it doesn't
offer any help in this regard.

> I realize I disagree with some of you about what should be in
> the tutorial, and what applications are interesting. Most of
> this disagreement can be summarized in three words: Morphic vs.
> Seaside.

I'd add another: "cool" vs. "pragmatic" Morphic. ;-)

By the way, and contradicting what I wrote at the very beginning of
this e-mail, I think I could write some tutorial-like stuff if I
managed to get that little GUI up and running. Is that enough of a
teaser? ;-)

Best,

Michael



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